The downward spiral of Youtube

I used to punch in youtube.com when I was bored or stuck in the library and could watch some television shows that i had to catch up on or the latest piece of comedic gold from The Daily Show or the Colbert Report that was the talk of the town. The time when you could find literally any video (non-pornographic that is) on youtube.com that you could possibly want to view is over or close to being so. Viacom is demanding the site to pull off all of the content that they deem belongs to them. This means all content from Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV and more will be immediotly removed.

The issue here, like usual, is money. As everyone knows, the sale of Youtube went to Google last fall, but it wasn't just because Google wanted a social networking site before Yahoo acquired one. It's is also because the amount of revenue youtube could seemingly bring in was ungodly. Google really seemed to mess things up here though. Viacom wanted nothing more than to work with Youtube because of its incredible popularity, but they demanded that Google figure out a way that both parties can make money, particularly to get some extra cash for the products produced by Viacom that is being shown for free on the website.

This move affects the fate of over 100,000 clips on the site. One could imagine that other conglomerates like Disney and NBC Universal could be the next to demand the same. Though this doesn'r really affect me personlly, it just seems like that this is the end of getting something for nothing on the old internet.



http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0e225e60-b2d6-11db-99ca-0000779e2340.html